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This book is about the making and unmaking of socio-cultural differences, seen from anthropological, sociological and philosophical perspectives. Some contributions are of a theoretical nature, such as when the »problem of translation«, »the enigma of alienity« or »queer theory« are addressed; other contributors throw light on contemporary issues like the integration of Muslims in Norway, identity-forming processes in »Creole« societies or »neo-traditionalist movements« and »identity« in Africa. Moreover, the book deals with »strangers« looked at from an »anthropology of the night«. Special emphasis is placed on how globalization and the rapid spread of ever new technologies of information have generated ever new patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and how these can be theorized.
Ethnologia Europaea is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed journal with a focus on European cultures and societies. It carries material of great interests not only for European ethnologists and anthropologists but also sociologists, social historians and scholars involved in cultural studies. The journal was started in 1967 and since then it has acquired a central position in the international and interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars inside and outside Europe. Ethnologia Europaea is an A ranked journal according to the European Science Foundation journal evaluation (European Reference Index for the Humanities initial list).
Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together i...
The roots and effects of insomnia are complex, Eluned Summers-Bremner reveals in this fascinating study, and humans have employed everything from art to science to understand, explain, and mitigate this problem.
Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human experience. Covering the narrativization of sleep in Austen, the politicization of sleep in Dickens, the queering of sleep in Goncharov, the aestheticization of sleep in Proust, and the medicalization of sleep in contemporary fiction, it examines the ways in which novelists envision the figure of the sleeper, the meanings they discover in human sleep, and the values they attach to it. It argues that literary fiction harbours, on its margins, a “sleeping partner”, one that we can nickname the Schlafroman or “sleep-novel”, whose quiet absorption in the wordlessness and passivity of human slumber subtly complicates the imperatives of self-awareness and purposive action that traditionally govern the novel.
While the night has long been associated with crime and fear, over recent decades ‘nightlife’ has become increasingly associated with the creative economy, tourism, sociability, job growth, and urban regeneration. Debates about anti-social behaviour, morality, and safety continue to shape our understanding of the night but newer concerns have also emerged about gentrification, economic and social exclusion, commercialisation, and over-development. Exploring Nightlife: Space, Society and Governance is the first edited volume that critically examines nightlife from a cross-disciplinary and international perspective. Comprising original contemporary research, the collection brings together ...
This book is about the "public realm," defined as a particular kind of social territory that is found almost exclusively in large settlements. This particular form of social-psychological space comes into being whenever a piece of actual physical space is dominated by relationships between and among persons who are strangers to one another, as often occurs in urban bars, buses, plazas, parks, coffee houses, streets, and so forth. More specifically, the book is about the social life that occurs in such social-psychological spaces (the normative patterns and principles that shape it, the relationships that characterize it, the aesthetic and interactional pleasures that enliven it) and the forc...
Taking the form of two companion volumes, Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland represents the first major investigation into summary justice in Scottish towns, c.1800 to 1892. Whereas Volume 1, subtitled Magistrates, Media and the Masses, analysed the establishment, development and practice of police courts, Volume 2 explores, through themed case studies, the role of police courts in moulding cultural ideas, social behaviours and urban environments in the nineteenth century.
In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and “take back the night” rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.
Virtual War and Magical Death is a provocative examination of the relations between anthropology and contemporary global war. Several arguments unite the collected essays, which are based on ethnographic research in varied locations, including Guatemala, Uganda, and Tanzania, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the United States. Foremost is the contention that modern high-tech warfare—as it is practiced and represented by the military, the media, and civilians—is analogous to rituals of magic and sorcery. Technologies of "virtual warfare," such as high-altitude bombing, remote drone attacks, night-vision goggles, and even music videoes and computer games that simulate battle, re...